Medical image acquisition techniques such as Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance (MR), etc., may provide a set or stack of slice images which together represent an image volume showing an anatomical structure of a patient. Such an image volume may provide a three-dimensional (3D) view of anatomical structures such as blood vessels, nodules, lesions or airways. Navigating through the image volume is often desired by clinicians, including but not limited to radiologists, for, e.g., diagnosis of a disease in the anatomical structure. For enabling a user to navigate through the image volume, the image volume may be displayed to the user as individual slice images through which the user may sequentially scroll. As such, the image volume may be visualized to the user in a slice-by-slice manner. One or more slice images from the set of slice images may comprise a region that is of particular interest to the user. For example, the set of slice images may show a blood vessel, and one or more slice images of the image volume may show a bifurcation or stenosis of the blood vessel which may be of particular interest to a radiologist.
Although other visualization techniques are known as well for visualizing an image volume, such as volume rendering as described in, e.g., US 2012/306849 A1, clinicians are known to prefer the display of slice images for at least diagnostic purposes.